Massachusetts, Circa 1988 I am thinking about the first time anyone heard the word computer. Was it like when I learned what Windows was? Or how a GPS could magically take me anywhere I wanted without getting lost? No more need to stop in for maps I’d never fold back in their envelopes. Those required something angular, something orderly, nothing like my mind. How I liked those concrete guides, though, reveled in running my forefinger over veiny lines that clearly meant something. to someone. This one, a river. This one a road. All so alive, and yet muddling when it came down to turning. I’d never really learned to follow directions. But something about the feel of paper on skin, the smell of fresh print – so grounding when I didn’t know where in the world I was. And that one time in Ashby, the road turning without warning, my mint green sedan, windows down, immediately guarded by fieldstone walls. Both sides of that passage just stood there, dim lighted, thick with congregating pine, oak, maple, the hushing conversation of air. I could smell late spring. Felt it pimple up on my forearms. There was a pull-off, and so I did, wandered into the woods alone. And suddenly, a jaw-dropping waterfall, tumbling away from itself, crashing into separation. The way the stream branched, running in both directions, jumping exhausted shale, white capped in its frenzy to get where it wanted. Where it needed. There I stood, stupidly stunned, solo with this memory making, this story of being lost among things that know where to go, when to go. And that icy water I could not resist washing my hands in, confusion dipping into clarity, digging into pebbles and sand as I listened in awe to everything that had power to direct itself. It strikes me now I no longer wander alone like that, that I’m never really lost anymore. And that questioning that lives in the stomach of anyone who can’t read a map has dissolved into static and waves. I start thinking again about the computer, the GPS, how much I love but resent these things that tell us where and when to go. I wonder if I’ve ever touched either with that same sense of wonder I did when I discovered Ashby. I wonder if I don’t wonder enough, don’t’ wander enough, don’t lose myself in the woods like I ought. And I don’t think I’ll ever get back to Ashby. Will I ever get back to solitude? I don’t know, but if I go missing, please do not try to find me. I’m logging into the wind. - Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt
Posted in Katherine's Coffeehouse
